Page 1385 - Week 04 - Thursday, 26 March 2009
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particular grants program, and the anticipated date for the commonwealth injection of money for the first round is 7 April.
We are getting on with this job, Mr Speaker. It is another example of federal and territory Labor working together to benefit our education system, and I urge members not to support this disallowance motion.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (10.33): This is quite an extraordinary motion from the planning minister. We will not be supporting it—as he will not be. It is quite an odd situation really. He is asking us not to support the motion that he is putting forward, and we certainly will not be. We are happy to take the free advice we get from the minister.
We need to look firstly at why this stunt has been brought on by the minister. My advice from the Clerk is that this does not actually provide any certainty. The certainty is provided by the fact that all parties have said that they are not going to disallow it. Bringing this on simply makes no difference.
Mr Barr: You can put your vote on the record, can’t you?
MR SESELJA: We have said that we will not disallow it and we will vote against the minister’s motion today, so there is the simple answer. It does not settle the situation, because the Legislation Act still allows six days, but, as I understand it, no-one is going to be moving disallowance in those six days. We knew that before this and we still know that. If someone wanted to, they could. We certainly will not be doing it—we would not support a disallowance motion if it were moved—as we are not today.
But going to some of the substance, the first point about these regs is that it is important that we see a streamlining of the planning system. We are the first to argue that the planning system often does not serve the needs of the territory in the way that it should, and this regulation is a recognition. It is certainly a recognition that, if you want to get things done in a timely manner, it appears that you have to find ways of exempting developers from going through the development application process. That is the clear precedent that is being set here by the minister: if you want to get something done quickly in the territory, don’t go through the usual processes; we need to exempt you. We know that that is the case.
It is an acknowledgement by the minister that what we have been saying is actually true. Many developments are being unreasonably delayed—often quite minor developments. We are not talking about major commercial developments, although they often have delays that are unreasonable; we are talking about far more simple developments, whether they be at the household level, whether they be extensions and the like or whether they be other minor developments. Many of these are being clogged in the system.
The minister talks about unclogging the system. We know why he did it just before Christmas, in December. It was because he was embarrassed to have to copy more of our policies. This is a minister who, after having slammed our education policy and our lower class size plan—saying that it was a poor use of resources, that it really was
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